Much to my surprise, the theater in the rancid backwater I call home actually booked a few showings of An Inconvenient Truth--the movie arrived on Friday. Convinced it won't stay in town for long, I went to see it yesterday.
It didn't tell me much I hadn't heard before, and I was just so thrilled that the movie might be seen by people who might otherwise not think about this stuff, that it really cheered me up. But then I started thinking about how different the world might be if Bush had not stolen the White House, and I got really depressed.
I don't know how Al Gore would have handled the 9/11 attacks but I am convinced he'd be a better president than Bush--and even in 2000, when I had little affection or admiration for Gore, I still knew he'd be better than Bush--I KNEW Bush would be a disaster; I knew he was simply a bad, bad man. It was very painful for me to listen to my friends in the Green party insist that there was no difference between the two major parties' candidates, because there was so little difference between the two major parties.
One reason I suffer so from insomnia is that I have always been a worrier. I sometimes wake up out of a deep sleep, my heart racing and my mouth dry with panic over melting polar ice caps and destruction of wetlands. My primary obsession is the environment and I admit that I have long felt it should be everyone's because if our world is uninhabitable, what does the rest of it matter?
I became concerned with the environment because I started paying attention to it, after a couple of decades of being trained to think of the earth as a combination self-replenishing piggy bank and bottomless toilet: anything you want, take from it, because there will always be more; anything you don't want, just dump it someplace where you can neither see nor smell it and that's it, it's gone. Realizing how thoroughly fucked up that approach is was a big deal for me, and one that caused as much conflict in my family as my departure from the Mormon church. One of the ways my Mormon Republican father earned a living was suing the likes of the Sierra Club whenever they did anything that would inhibit the right of farmers to suck as much water as they wanted out of the local river, or inhibit the right of timber companies to cut down trees on our mountain, or inhibit the right of ranchers to kill any and all wildlife they didn't like. He was not happy when I joined the ACLU, but he said, "Just so long as you never join the Sierra Club."
I've lost track of how many environmental organizations I belong to (including the Sierra Club) but I feel it's a losing battle. I will continue to try to minimize and compensate for the amount of CO2 I produce, but we've just fucked so many things up--and so many people don't want to change. My neighbors, for instance, leave their porch light on all night and sometimes forget to turn it off in the morning--it drives me NUTS to see it burning there all day, giving off heat (because that's what incandescent bulbs do) and CO2.
Here's the thing: WE SUCK at our primary job as human beings, which is to take care of one another and the world we live in. I'm not much one for volunteering or activism any more--my mission kind of killed that impulse--but perhaps I must force myself to do it anyway. But what should I do?
It's not like simply knowing about shit really helps much: In early 2003, when it became clear that we were going to war no matter what, I became a news junkie. I began spending two to three hours every day reading half a dozen online newspapers, trying to understand what was happening in our world, as if understanding it could somehow mitigate its destructiveness. And then, after the elections in 2004, I forced myself to cut back. I got rid of my online subscription to the Washington Post and a few other newspapers. I even canceled my subscription to my local paper, which had endorsed George Bush for president. I felt so impotent and enraged and hopeless that I just couldn't bear it. Which is pretty much how I feel right now.
Aside from a few details, I'm with you every step of the way.
Yes I believe Bush stole the election (Diebold, brother Jeb, etc) but keep in mind that supposedly 38% of Americans still approve of the job he's doing! How is that possible?! Answer is that a lot of Americans really are that brainwashed/blind/scary.
And I also believe that the only ones who will go to see An Inconvenient Truth are the ones who think like you and me. We're the ones who recycle our paper and turn off unnecessary lights. Everyone else drives their SUV to work every day.
One more thing: Dubya isn't just bad. He's *stupid* which is every bit as dangerous.
Don't give up Holly! I realize you are are discouraged, but if you give up something you believe in, you will feel worse!
Years ago it seemed to me Canadians were all "gung ho" about the environment, and then it was like we lost interest. That's the way it is sometimes. If nobody is talking, people forget.....push it to the back of the mind. But it's up to people like you, and me, and who ever gives a damn to raise shit about it.
I've been waiting to see An Inconvenient Truth for a while. I watched an interview with Al Gore and George Stroumboloupolous on CBC's The Hour, and was impressed. Later, I watched George interview David Suzuki, and was even more impressed by how emotional he was about the Kyoto Accord and I thought "Right ON!!" Get upset, get mad, make a big stink about it!
In fewer words Holly, you're not alone :)
Thank you for this. I really need to see this movie, as I am vastly ignorant about many things of global import.
FWIW, I'm a Green who voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in '04. I'm still a little pissed off at Nader, and wonder if he helped give the White House to Bush.
I agree with Madeleine that Al Gore is mainly preaching to the choir, but it bumped up my commitment a couple of notches, and turned me from an introverted environmentalist into a slightly more evangelistic one. Consciousness-raising is a slow process, but the success (at least in the U.S.) of the tobacco campaigns gives me a tiny bit of hope.
Being kind to the Earth in our modern society is tough. To put things in perspective, I'm sure that the CO2 contribution of your neighbor's light bulb is nothing like the exhaust of your cruise ship (equal to 10 to 12,000 cars) or of my cross-country jet flight last week to/from North Carolina. For the first time in my life, I'm questioning the morality of vacation travel.
I can empathize with your worrying. I exhausted myself protesting the war, and descended into a numb political malaise after the ground invasion was launched. I think I'm only now extricating myself.
I live in a world without God and in a universe devoid of justice and purpose. One of the things that keeps from adopting a completely nihilist approach is that I feel like the only hope for the next generation or two is for a few of us to not give up hope. If we all give up, then there really is no hope. If a few of us persevere, sure, we might still be screwed, but we might have a chance.
I find some inspiration in this quote from Gandhi: "What you do is of little significance, but it is very important that you do it."
We're heading for Denver tomorrow morning and might be able to catch that flick over the weekend. Thanks for the tip.
I used to be just like you (as you describe in your post, I mean) and nearly drove myself nuts. One day my mom, in a rare lucid moment, told me to just worry about my corner of the world, just the stuff I could control, and if everybody did that the world would be a better place. Suddenly I didn't feel so helpless, so irrelevant.
I hope you can pick a good corner to be your own, and I promise to work on mine from over here.
Hi everyone--thanks for stopping by. Madeliene (btw, you have one of my favorite names in the world), I agree with you that it's amazing that anyone still supports Bush, but I do think this movie has attracted some viewers who weren't already among the converted--I've talked to a couple of them. It amazes me that anyone still has any doubt on this topic, but if the movie helps persuade anyone, it's doing a service.
Melanie and Juti, it's good to know I'm not the only one. And I am better than I used to be at not obsessing over things I can't control.... but I still think that part of the point of being a moral human being is to care about things don't affect us directly, to care about people who AREN'T us.
John--you wrote To put things in perspective, I'm sure that the CO2 contribution of your neighbor's light bulb is nothing like the exhaust of your cruise ship (equal to 10 to 12,000 cars) or of my cross-country jet flight last week to/from North Carolina.
Well, you know, DUH, if you're talking only this one incident. But what is the POINT of having a porch light burning at noon on a cloudless day? It's irrelevant. It's utterly wasted. And it's a waste born of laziness and carelessness. At least a trip to visit friends/family has a point.
Yesterday afternoon I worked up the nerve to talk to my neighbor about his porch light. He admitted that he'd noticed a couple of hours earlier that the light was still on in the day but hadn't gotten around to turning it off, but said he'd do so shortly. (He did, in about another half hour.) I asked why they left the light on all night, and he said it was a habit his partner (who is about 50) acquired in her childhood: her mother turned the porch light on as soon as the sun went down and left it on all night because there was once a prowler in the neighborhood, and his partner had just acquired the same habit.
So if you consider that this is merely a single day in a life-long habit, rather than an isolated incident that is never repeated, then it's a bigger deal, and I imagine the CO2 produced by this HABIT, rather than this INCIDENT, is significant.
None of us can refrain from PRODUCING CO2--we do that when we breathe. But we can think about what activities are valuable/meaningful enough that we'll engage in them anyway, at the cost of other things. Leaving a light burning every night because your mother used to? Leaving the TV on at all times because it's a convenient night light, makes possible intruders think someone is home, and you don't like to walk into an silent house? Setting your thermostat at 72 degrees no matter what the weather, because you like to be comfortable? Well, that seems really stupid to me. Deciding you'll never travel or visit family and friends who live far away because of the exhaust involved? That also seems stupid. But you can try to do it more efficiently, less frequently, and also do things that offset the emissions (like planting trees).
And of course, the single most significant thing you can do to reduce your ecological impact on the planet is to refrain from reproducing--or, if you really want kids, at least reproduce LESS. The one shocking moment for me in AIT was when Gore said that the planet's population would likely reach 9 billion within the next generation.
I think it's important to refrain from pointing the finger of blame at others about energy consumption. We need intelligent solutions to global problems.
I agree with you, Holly: everything we do has an impact and it's important to be as aware as possible of those costs, who bears them, and how they might be mitigated.
On population growth, demographers used to say that the earth's human popluation doubles about every 32 years. I think the rate has slowed a bit recently. In any case, for many of your readers I suspect the population has doubled within our lifetimes. Part of the problem that comes from fragmented knowledge, the way we divide what we know into non-communicating disciplines, is that something raw like a claim of population growth rate can be used to make various claims. Starting in the 1960s, people started to get worried about "overpopulation." "Limits to growth" arguments based themselves on variations of Malthus's ideas and then were routinely shot down by people in favor of capitalist economies who could show that increasing productivity could provide for the increasing population.
The economists have a point. The problem is that they also ignore costs that can be "externalized" (in economics jargon: what it means is that the costs can be pushed onto someone else). Any notion of unlimited growth depends also on ever expanding consumption, which uses more resources and produces more waste. So we get "the end is nigh" sorts of arguments whose predictions are routinely proven wrong by people whose "rising tides lift all boats" arguments ignore environmental costs.
There is another problem with the "overpopulation" idea: it often is code for "too many brown people." In Europe and increasingly in the US now, there is an argument going around that runs along the lines that Western Civilization is failing to breed at fast enough rates and will be overwhelmed by migrants. The implicit racism of this notion is pretty clear. Ironically, it has also been ebraced by conservative mullahs in The Netherlands who argue that they can take over the country if the women will just have enough babies.
I think the task is to try to understand both the scientific arguments about climate change and the social and political economic processes at work. (There is a book I never tire of encouraging people to read that does just this: it's Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts. Davis examines both how El Nino produces droughts around the world but how it took colonialism to turn the droughts into famines.) As it happens, wealthy people do tend to reproduce more slowly. It probably has to do with having better life chances: women who are more educated, for example, tend to have children later in life; better life expectancy at birth reduces the pressure to have many children so that enough survive.
From a feminist point of view, there are clear environmental advantages to giving women increasing control over reproduction, which would come along with improving the life chances for women generally. From a political economy perspective, reducing the net flows of wealth from the poor parts of the world to the rich would both slow wasteful consumerism and improve the life chances of the poor.
Sorry about the long comment...
No need to apologize for saying something thoughtful and important on my blog, Spike.
Starting in the 1960s, people started to get worried about "overpopulation."
Yes, and you can well imagine the Mormon response to that, back when a small family was a mere THREE OR FOUR children (instead of six or eight--or eleven, like my aunt and uncle had). I can't think of a single person among my Mormon childhood peers who had only one sibling, and I knew only one "only child" when I was growing up--and we all thought she was kind of a freak. (And of course she wasn't Mormon.)
Anyway, there was this dreadful Mormon rock opera that came out in 1973: "Saturday's Warriors." And there was a song in it parroting the argument that the planet had limited resources, and that we should therefore take any steps--even personal ones--designed to limit the number of people on the planet. But the song is sung by explicitly evil people trying to seduce one of the main characters away from Mormonism, and is there so it can be proven wrong in the end. (I tried to find the lyrics to this particular song but couldn't.)
And there were frequent talks from the pulpit condemning any parents who intentionally indulged in the "selfish" practice of having small families. Birth control, to limit WHEN children were born (you could space them out every couple of years) was OK, but you were supposed to start breeding early, and breed often.
There is another problem with the "overpopulation" idea: it often is code for "too many brown people." In Europe and increasingly in the US now, there is an argument going around that runs along the lines that Western Civilization is failing to breed at fast enough rates and will be overwhelmed by migrants. The implicit racism of this notion is pretty clear.
I've been thinking about that recently, and about the notion of the America as "the great melting pot": difference is supposed to be OK, as long as it all gets boiled out of you at the end of the day, and you end up an English-speaking Christian who, if not white, at least has the decency to ACT white.
And then there are organizations like the Mormon church, who still export Christianity and ideologies that are thoroughly American, even if you don't have to speak English to accept them. (Though in many non-English speaking countries, one way missionaries create interest in the church is by offering very cheap and very poorly taught English classes.)